1/ I want to highlight a subtle but crucial dynamic of lockdowns that could explain why politicians like @GovWhitmer are so reluctant to buckle to reality and open up. Two factors drive the dynamic, one relatively well-understood and the other less so...

2/ The first is that outside of NYC, states appear to have imposed the lockdowns relatively early in the cycle of #SARS_CoV2 ; the serology studies generally suggest that fewer than 10 percent of people (sometimes 5 percent) had been infected as of a month ago...

3/ What this means is that as soon as we open up, we're back in mid-March. This is a medium-sized medical problem - the NY experience suggests that even under the worst-case scenario hospitals will not be overrun, and we should be able to do a better job protecting seniors now...

4/ And as we all know (including the governors), the real #COVID risk is to seniors - especially in congregate facilities like nursing homes. But for the lockdown governors, it is a HUGE political problem, because if all the lockdowns did was delay the inevitable spread...

5/ Then why did we put ourselves through all this pain?

Okay, so people who are paying attention are relatively aware of this factor.

But there's another issue - and, perversely, it is driven by the fact that:

The lockdowns don't really work.

6/ What do I mean? Tens of millions of people are essential workers; tens of millions more are going outside all the time. Western-style lockdowns are just not hard enough to reduce R much below 1 (you'd need to force people to shut in and have the military supply to get there).

7/ What this means is that, say, in a region where 1.5% of people were actively infected in mid-March, the virus is still quietly spreading at roughly that pace every week. Which means that in a month another 6% of people should be infected, assuming R is roughly flat...

8/ And it is possible that some of the smarter governors/public health experts are hoping that if they can just delay long enough - 3, 4, 5 months - they will quietly dribble their way to something close to herd immunity, whatever happens with a vaccine...

9/ Of course, the flipside is that people are still getting infected (which doesn't matter MOST of the time) - but when the virus hits vulnerable populations, deaths continue. (But, in turn, they use that fact to justify the continued lockdowns)...

10/ This also may explain some of the seemingly random moves some governors have made to reopen; I am cynical enough to wonder if they don't WANT the R to fall below 1, because they need that quiet spread to continue if they are ever going to get close to herd immunity.

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